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Untitled Document Gender equality in science made headlines repeatedly this year. Nobel-prizewinning biochemist Tim Hunt made his ill-advised quip about women in labs; Shrinivas Kulkarni, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, called astronomers and their telescopes “boys with toys”; and in a much more serious matter, astronomer Geoff Marcy resigned from his post at the University of California, Berkeley, after public disclosure that he had sexually harassed female students. More quietly, there were rumours that at least three astronomers had been dismissed, and in some cases scrubbed from institutional websites.

None of these incidents were in any way related to motherhood, which was — and is — too often invoked to explain the dearth of women in science. (Gender is of course neither binary nor necessarily stationary; that I talk about 'women' and 'men' in this piece is not meant to obscure that point.)

As the mother of two amazing women, I would say that family issues are the least of the problem. It is unquestionably true that employers must improve support of families...